YMMV / MapleStory

• Accidental Innuendo:
  • Horned Mushrooms used to be called Horny Mushrooms.
  • From Black Heaven:
  Geilmer's Document: Orchid's body is beautiful. [...] I must make it mine.
• Adorkable:
  • Just take a look at some of Evan's NPC expressions.
    Evan: [After being declared the leader by the other Legends] M-me?! Uh... well, I... don't know if I'm qualified, but I'll try... Erm, I mean...
  • Prior to his transformation, Illium was shy, nervous, easily startled, horribly lacking in confidence, and was prone to bawling while muttering to himself or Ex. He grows out of this considerably after his transformation due to his personality merging with the one inside the Elder Crystal.
• Arc Fatigue: The entire Temple of Time questline. It wouldn't be bad to go out and kill 200 monsters, only if it wasn't required to kill 200 of every monster in the temple to progress from map to map. You can bypass this with a teleport rock, but if you don't have any real life money to spend or aren't in an event period offering one, you're out of luck. It gets worse once you realize you have to do this to get access to Pink Bean and complete the Silent Crusade questline, not to mention the quest that tells you who Kao is.
  • Made even better with the addition of 5th job, where this questline is also a mandatory prerequisite for job advancement.
  • Not that this is as bad as it sounds anymore- a single quest in this chain can be cleared in 5 minutes or less with most characters, and odds are you are probably grinding at them anyway or working on another quest that requires you to kill 200 or 300 monsters in level range. It's also worth noting that it was even worse before: It used to be that you had to kill 999 of each mob.
• Alt-itis: The game gives you eight ^note formerly three character slots per world initially, but even more can be purchased and they're given out in events often enough. It doesn't help that the game has several systems encouraging this:
  • The Blessing of the Fairy and Empress' Blessing skills. They both have similar effects, which are minor stat increases, with the higher level one taking precedence over the lower level one. Their levels depend on the level of the highest level character you have in that world other than the one you're currently playing as. Every 10 levels of a class other than a Cygnus Knight gives 1 level to Blessing of the Fairy while every 5 levels of a Cygnus Knight gives a level to Empress' Blessing.
  • All classes released since Cannoneer (along with regular Cygnus Knights and Resistance classes post-revamp), have Link Skills, which are special Beginner skills that can be shared with one other character after reaching a certain level, and get stronger when a higher level is reached. One character can have up to twelve Link Skills (not including their own Link Skill if they have one).
  • All classes give Character Cards, which are basically Link Skills that apply to all characters in a world. Each Character Card gives a small boost, which increases when the character associated with that card levels up. You get three 'Decks' that can hold three cards, for a total of nine cards. You can't use two cards that have the same class, but putting three related cards gives a boost (ex. three warrior cards gives a damage boost based on HP, three cards that belong to the Resistance gives a stat boost, etc.)
  • The character card system mentioned above has since been replaced with the Legion system, which works a similar way, and even starts with using nine units, but by earning coins with the legion and raising the overall total level of all your units you can level up your legion and get to place more units in it, capping at getting benefits from 40 (the current cap is 42) units if your total level is over 10,000 (which would require those 40 units to all be level capped)
• Alternative Character Interpretation: The Friendstory counterparts of Hilla and Magnus open up a can of worms regarding their Maple World selves; either it has no real significance and the two just downright loathe each other, or it's parallel to a possible side of their relationship we don't see.
  • Heroes of Maple introduces issues with the heroes themselves-
    • Is Aran a proud warrior or is she simply too arrogant for her own good? Her social skills are poor, leaving it hard to tell if she's rude on purpose or accident and her clothing choices leave one to wonder if she isn't trying to deliberately show off her body, since she will unbutton shirts just to show off cleavage. Does she want Maple World to adore her? Her role in Maple Rising Star shows she was eager to participate but Maha thought it was a complete waste of time with more important issues to worry about.
    • Is Mercedes a reliable ally in this fight or was she forced into this war without choice, leaving her stressed and on the edge of cracking?
    • Is Phantom genuinely on the side of the heroes or did he simply want personal revenge and nothing else? He's seen back to his old habits of theft and tries to kill Luminous when they get into a fight.
    • So is Luminous reliable or does his origins split form the Black Mage coupled with his corrupted state make him an extreme liability that could betray the others at any minute? In his fight with Phantom, rather then a simple defend and subdue tactic, he tries to cut the man's head right off. And as Phantom suggested, was he actually unwilling to use the Transcedent Stone to kill the Black Mage out of fear it would also kill him?
    • Is Evan's heart really into this fight or does he feel obligated to be involved simply because his ancestor was?
    • Is Demon genuinely on the side of good or was he merely pushed into personal revenge? Will he ever be expected to atone for the past crimes he committed while serving the Black Mage and will the deaths of his family ultimately cause him to break down?
    • Is Shade going to see the fight through or will his curse end up destroying his will to go on?
  • How much one thinks Kinesis' motive is rooted in his need to be a hero or his need to punch the White Mage's face in can fluctuate wildly depending on what part of his story the player is at.
  • The finer lines of the White Mage's Friendstory counterpartare never really elaborated on, leaving it unclarified if he was his own person, or a fragment/projection of the Black Mage. Evidence can be taken for either side.
• Americans Hate Tingle: In GMS, five servers had to be fused together due to low traffic (creating MYBCKN^note Mardia, Yellonde, Bellocan, Chaos, Kradia, Nova). In KMS? The Black Mage update had so many players that the entire game was locking up and crashing near daily.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • Players who completed the first two quests of the Madhouse Halloween Event - a dungeon with so much luck involved that Nexon had to install a patch halfway through to prevent bad luck from rendering a player unable to progress at all due to having no Batteries and entering a room without any - was probably expecting the Boss Battle at the end to be a climatic fight unlike any the Maple World had ever seen. Unfortunately, Sean is actually not much harder than Dr. Cosi was in terms of actual power, and really wouldn't have presented a challenge to a prepared player who had made it that far. (Possibly the whole point, seeing as she had always attacked by ambush in the dark before, a face-to-face fight may have been an Achilles' Heel.)
  • The last fight with Will in Zero's story is pitifully easy due to Zero's likely enormous damage range at that point and contributes to the No Ending.
• Archive Panic: Of course, this is an MMORPG.
  • However in the latests updates (which are getting fewer), they are now totally concentrated in new areas and to finish the main storyline.
• Awesome Music: Now with its own page.
• Breather Boss: Most of the Bosses in the Theme Dungeons (which themselves are Breather Levels and optional quest lines can count as this, especially the ones early on like Captain Darkgoo, the Mole King, Ephenia, and King Sage Cat.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • The chance to finally take down Gelimer is one of the most highly anticipated parts of the Black Heaven campaign, especially for Resistance players.
  • Also in Black Heaven, after you successfully outrun the Pulverizer for the second time in Chapter 4, likely having suffered dozens of Undignified Deaths at the damn thing's hands by now, you're likely just as angry at it as your character seems to be, and it's very satisfying to see the Resistance leaders fly in and blow it to pieces. (Even more so, because up to this scene, Belle, Brighton, and Checky were believed dead.)
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Kanna's map wide attacks, powerful short range spells, and her ability to boost the enemy spawn rate have made her very commonplace among players. Kaiser was also this before a few nerfs down the line.
  • Unfortunately this also made the Kanna class very popular with hackers, leading to stricter autoban systems in place on Kannas that caught a lot of legit players, as well as future Kanna nerfs to make the class less desirable.
• Complete Monster:
  • Magnus the Betrayer is the power-hungry, megalomanical antagonist of the Nova storylines. Exiled years ago for abusing his powers, he sided with the Arch-Enemy of the Nova race and carried out an attack on Heliseum, killing many, including Cadena's family. His actions eventually required the previous Kaiser to step in, ending with him performing an unsuccessful Heroic Sacrifice, Magnus then taking the Nova's capital as well as their champion and protector in one fell swoop. He's shown to absolutely revel in his actions, taking pride in being a mass murderer and double-crosser, joining two different forces wishing to destroy the world only to gain abilities to cause more destruction in his path. Feared by the Nova, reviled by Kaiser and Angelic Buster, and hated by the Black Mage's commanders, Magnus never bothers showing any remorse or sympathy to whom he affects, and he enjoys every second of it.
  • Gelimer of the Black Wings stands out among the non-commander antagonists as a testament to low the Black Wings are capable of going; while originally perhaps well-meaning, he created a gas that would render whoever was exposed to it dead or a puppet of his to control, and fell down the slippery slope until he was recruited by Orchid. He proceeded to kidnap and roboticize Xenon, an innocent child, and possibly Beryl; created at least one Manchurian Agent out of his human test experiments; and turns against Orchid by using her brother, Lotus, to pilot a warship that would drop the gas he created all over the Maple World. Gelimer's complete lack of empathy and desire for a world without human emotion is portrayed as chillingly humorless compared to the other antagonists in the game, and he's serious about completing his ambition, no matter how many people have to suffer for it.
• Continuity Lock-Out: Began to rear its head in later updates; certain dungeon questlines (such as Kerning Mall and Mushroom Castle) were updated to be about after their previous iterations (i.e about what happened after Blake rose to stardom, the focus of the original questline), meaning that unless the player was present for the years before then, they won't get much of the context of the current incarnation.
• Crazy Is Cool: The Adventurer Pirate classes are known for having some of the most bizarre attacking skills in the game. Examples include shooting boxing gloves or drills out of a cannon^note Cannoneer's Cannon Strike and Cannon Spike respectively, smacking a drum with said cannon to stun enemies^note Cannoneer's Monkey Wave, firing a gun wildly in every direction like a deranged cartoon character^note Corsair's Bullet Party, and nuking their enemies with cannon fire from a flying submarine^note Nautilus Strike, a skill shared by all three branches. They're just as effective as the more serious classes.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Francis, the Black Wings puppeteer and resident Butt-Monkey, has been getting considerable fanart lately.
  • Magnus is an especially popular character for fanart too, his rugged appearance and infamous status as a ridiculously hard boss make him a fan favorite, especially among the yaoi fangirls who ship him with both the Old Kaiser and Kyle.
  • The event-only Wondroids have gotten their own following due to their cute, charming designs and the fact that they function as the Awesome, but Impractical androids but with actual stat bonuses attached.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Go looking for them and the small but dedicated fans of the game's lore are bound to have variable opinions on the game's story, with many of them favoring either pre-retconned or rewritten story or straight up filling in what they dislike with headcanon. Destiny's revamp of the Explorer questline is generally the one most people ignore in favor of the old questline, with many considering it a massive downgrade.
• Foe Yay Shipping: People seem rather fond of drawing Kaiser and Magnus in a Yaoi situation despite a sizable age difference. There's also Velderoth.
• Game-Breaker: In general, each new class Nexon brings out will at least start as a Game-Breaker. As of the time of this writing, it will be Xenon and Demon Avenger. The pattern usually goes that a new class starts as a Game-Breaker, receives some Nerfs a patch or two after, then receive buffs again in later patches (see: Mercedes, Demon Slayer).
  • In the past, there used to be a "world record" for a group of players on a server killing Zakum, the first of several bosses that used to require a raid of people to fight, in around two minutes. There is also a video of a newer class, the Angelic Buster, killing Zakum on her own in four seconds.
  • The Kaiser class has consistently remained one of the strongest classes with one of the highest, if not the highest DPS, being very mobile, fast attacking, powerful, and the ability to transform into Final Form for even more power, and to drive it home further, they receive a Hyper Skill at Level 200 that allows them to instantly transform into Final Form, AND ignore the nasty Damage Reflect to boot.
  • Zero. Not only do they have top notch DPS, they also have both Teleport and Flash Jump on top of passive speed boosts for impressive mobility. The dual character system of the class also regenerates the inactive characters HP and TP bars very quickly, meaning that you're most likely to be switching into a character with full bars. And outside of their skills, Zeroes also start off at level 100, have access to their own unique dungeons to level very quickly from there, can raise their profession levels up to 10 without actual having to craft anything (still costs fatigue though), get free trait stats daily, and their weapons upgrade as they level and can be reset for potential without using cubes. The only issues they have are that you have to have a level 100 character already, you have to do the class-exclusive questline (especially if you want to upgrade your Link Skill), Alpha's skills move him around a lot, and the timeframe for making them is even more limited than other classes.
  • Pink Bean is this on purpose with immensely high damage percentages even on his starting skills, Pink Bean can decimate even major bosses that would require extremely high end gear for normal characters without much sweat. A newer version of the event also introduces Yeti as a class, and he's just as strong as Pink Bean.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • Thanks to a bug in which Jett can't speak to her original job instructor, she can't proceed into Temple of Time past the first boss. This makes finding decent places to train that much harder and can really slow down leveling. Despite Nexon being aware of the problem for some time, and even having fixed it once before(until a later patch broke it again), they've made no effort to fix it.
• Good Bad Bugs: These have since been patched, but between the Bodyguards in Showa (Japan version only) and Bigfoot in Crimsonwood Keep, Maple Story programmers seem to be quite good at forgetting to make bosses unpoisonable. What makes the latter even more hilarious is that it was released alongside a new server which had a double EXP event. Cue the speed-leveling Fire/Poison Mages.
  • Due to some oddities with the physics engine, jumping while walking on certain slopes, or jumping while taking damage from spikes(typically the thorny plants in some areas) can send the player rocketing pretty fast in a super jump. Made useless by many classes getting double jump, though.
  • Entering a map can sometimes reward a player with the max level of spawnable monsters in that screen all grouped together on one platform. Execute a Herd-Hitting Attack and the EXP earns itself.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In 2007, the anime, which was an adaptation In Name Only, had a plot revolving around the World Tree. Flash forward, and the actual game introduces the concept of a World Tree that's present in nearly all storylines.
• Good Bad Translation:
  • At places in English version. One of the most outrageous ones is the case of Horny Mushrooms in the European version. Originally "Horny Mushrooms" in Global (mushrooms with horns.), they were changed into "Horn-shape mushrooms". And no, no typo there. However, they renamed them "Horny Mushroom" in Europe too, but forgot to rename the ETC-drop, which is still called "Horn-shape Mushroom Cap". Also, they couldn't decide how to translate the Knights of Cygnus; SEA and Global have different names for them and Europe (which takes most of stuff straight from Global) uses SEA names.
  • And the "Wind Breaker" class, as mentioned above.
  • There is a quest given by The Rememberer that requires you to kill a certain number of Horny Mushrooms. It's called "Raging Horny Mushrooms."
  • Zero's entire quest line is full of spelling and grammatical mistakes that persist even into 2018.
• Ho Yay:
  • Because Kaiser's dialogue in his quests are the same regardless of gender, the female Kaiser is also implied to have a crush on Tear. A female NPC will also flirt with Kaiser.
    • Similarly, Kaiser's closeness with Velderoth leads to many fan-arts depicting the two as a couple. Like so.
    • Now there is official artwork that hints of Angelic Buster and Cadena being more than just friends.
  • Similarly, while cutscenes and other small details (such as a fairy schoolgirl having a poster of Phantom) depict Phantom as male, a player Phantom can be assigned female, with her Ladykiller in Love aspect still intact.
  • There's fanart of pretty much every major character or class getting it down with another regardless of gender. Seriously, practically every major art site is filled with it.
  • One of the random classrooms in the Red Leaf High event involves having to flirt with one of three female NPCs, regardless of the player character's gender.
  • Eunwol/Shade's reaction to dying in the end of the black mage fight, well, let's just say Freunwol shippers had a field day.
  • There is definitely some subtext involving Lucid and Mercedes.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!.
  • While many pots drastically cut in price at the main towns after Big Bang, the outskirt towns that had high healing or % pots, which are still very much expensive.
    • For that matter, many of the quest unlocked stores have absurdly high prices for common items.
  • Outside of big bang edits, there are a large number of forgotten towns, that routinely miss most updates of store or game function.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Jett has run of the mill stats (alongside a mechanic of re-configuring them randomly with a randomly dropped item), "okay" skills, absolutely piddling damage output (making her a worse Death by a Thousand Cuts situation than Mercedes), relies entirely on critical rate, and is a Glass Cannon, giving her the moniker of possibly the worst class in the game even after multiple re-balances. She briefly got a surge of activity after the Override update, though... because there was a bug that gave her a zero cool-down on a map-wide attack. Once it was patched, Jetts faded out of the game once again. So big were her issues that she is eventually slated to be phased out entirely from the game sometime in 2024.
• Memetic Badass: Due to being the former strongest boss in the game and being incredibly hard to defeat, while also still being pretty cute, many Maplers believe that Pink Bean may be the mutated son of Chuck Norris.
• Memetic Mutation: @@@@^Explanation Players who sell items will often raise their messages by padding their chat bubble with a lot of @'s (the widest possible character).
• Nausea Fuel: During the Korean Folk Town quest line, you have to deal with a tiger forcing a woman to make rice cakes for him. Both the tiger and your NPC partner find the cakes irresistibly delicious, however the baker's son refuses to touch them for an unspecified reason. At the end we find out the secret to the great taste is that the woman refuses to wash her hands, ever, and has let them accumulate dirt for years. She then swats a fly with her hands. The tiger runs to vomit and your partner swears off rice cakes for good.
• Player Punch: In the Resistance storyline, Vita, the girl you rescued during the tutorial, turns out to be a Manchurian Agent programed by Gelimer. Then, when the player goes to rescue her, she's rigged to a bomb that will blow up if she tries to escape. Thus, in order to save the player, Vita forces the trap to explode before the player can even attempt to rescue her.
  • In the new Explorer storyline, not only does the Black Mage break free before you can attempt to fix the seal, but as retribution for trying to stop him, he attacks Maple Island.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Sadly. As its name would imply, Maplestory has a surprisingly in-depth plot with strong characterization, varied dialogue (some of it is comedy gold while others reach Tear Jerker levels), and a great number of settings and ulterior motives. Unfortunately this is skipped since grinding is primarily seen as faster than questing when it comes to getting to high levels.
• Scrappy Mechanic: A couple from older versions that were fortunately removed:
  • Intercontinental travel. First, you had to buy an expensive ticket. Then, you had to wait for a ship to arrive. Then, wait several more minutes to travel to its destination. Tickets were later made free, and the option to rent a plane (which is much faster than the ships) was added. The addition of the dimensional mirror sending you to Alishan instantly, which has a portal to Henesys, which is only two screens away from a portal to Pantheon, which has a portal to every major area, has made even that obsolete.
  • Originally, Party Quests, the fastest way of getting experience, could only accept one party per channel. Older players might remember spending more time looking at the party leader saying "CC 2... CC 3... CC 4..." looking for a free channel than actually doing the quests.
  • When taking the ship between Orbis and Victoria Island in either direction, there is a 50% chance two Crimson Balrogs will show up, killing anyone not strong enough to face them, and making you go back to where you were. However, there’s also a safe zone inside the ship, which is where everyone would hang out anyways.
  • To get to Crimsonwood Keep, or just to the training maps before it, one has to go through two maps where a monster that does 10k or so damage randomly spawns. After that one has to do a jump quest which involves dodging giant totem poles that will OHKO you if you touch them. When one gets to Lower Ascent and the next few maps it's possible to fall off the map, forcing you to do the second part of the jump quest again.
  • This game just loves to spawn monsters right where you're standing. This is especially frustrating as a Mechanic since the mech has no knockback and can block out quite a few enemy sprites. You suddenly take damage for no apparent reason until you move or the enemy comes into view.
  • When you're trying to fight a mob one by one, your character either locks on one mook you hit first, regardless of where it is as long as it is within your attack range, while ignoring other mooks which are about to crash onto you, or locks on random mooks in the mob, usually the furthest ones, even after you hit the one on your face, while ignoring other mooks which are about to crash onto you. This is why multi-target attacks/crowd control are extremely useful, and Wizet indeed seems to acknowledge this by giving most new classes some crowd control skills; when you can smack multiple mooks at once, it doesn't really matter which ones are almost out of reach and which ones are about to crash onto you.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: They have these up the yin-yang; holiday events, seasonal events, Maple High, World Tour... It's rare the game doesn't have at least one in progress. These events and games let you earn coins to earn useful items (and a lot of frivolous stuff like fancy chairs and mounts).
• "Stop Having Fun" Guys:
  • Kill stealers were a big problem in previous years, when training spots were limited and ranged classes reigned supreme. Now, with the abundance of maps and places to train at, kill stealers are much harder to come by, however, they are still there, usually on the bandwagon for whatever powerful Game-Breaker class was just released.
  • For a while, there was a group of people who would insult you for not following a specific build. If you didn't roll perfect stats at creation and stuck with it, or invested in skills that they don't recommend, they called you a bad player. The stats bit has lessened since the game gives you "perfect" stats automatically upon creation and you can choose to let the game auto-distribute your stats now, as well as coupons sold on the cheap from vendors to reset stats if you do mess up(formerly exclusive to the cash shop and requiring real money but now purchasable with mesos) but they're still out there.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • Battlefield, the tune that plays in the Showa hideout sounds a lot like Battle Without Honor Or Humanity from Kill Bill.
  • The Alien map music, ''NLC Kidnap'', from the March 2012 Alien event sounds quite a bit like ''Phantasmagoria'' from GunGirl 2.
  • Despair On Devil, the tune that plays during Demon Slayer's plot line, is very similar to the theme from Morrowind.
    • Release Your Spirits High also sounds like it copies a fair bit from the recurring theme of the Elder Scrolls series.
  • A rather unusual example- the Neo Tokyo music track Tokyo Sky sounds quite a bit like a fan remix of one of the Elder Scrolls Oblivion battle themes. The fan remix predates the Maplestory track by about a year.
  • Urban Street, the music for the Friendstory world map, sounds a bit like a more upbeat version of the Fourside theme from EarthBound (1994).
  • The main recurring theme through the Temple of Time region is one of the more well-known pieces from the game's soundtrack... however the main chorus is nearly note-for-note identical to the Oompa Loompa song from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
  • Compare "Raindrop Flower" to "Birabuto Kingdom" from Super Mario Land
• That One Attack:
  • Seduce is a universally annoying status effect. It removes control from your character and forces them to do a certain action (such as running to one side, jumping, or ducking) until the effect runs out. And it doesn't let you use potions, meaning that you're left hoping that the boss doesn't kill you before you can move again. And the only way to remove that status effect is to use a skill called Hero's Will that has a least a 6 minute cooldown, or have a Bishop dispell it (and this option wasn't available t first).
  • Damage reflect is always annoying because it's easy to miss when the boss activates it, so you can accidentally kill yourself if you aren't paying attention. Most main bosses (and even a few minor ones) have it, although with most you get a warning of some sort before they do, not all of which are easy to see. The best way to avoid this is to prevent said Boss from using it with a Debuff.
  • The Interface Screw used by some bosses isn't technically an "attack" (it's actually a property of the rooms you fight them in, which makes you unable to negate it, and thus worse) but it's horribly annoying for characters who depend on potions to keep fighting. These arenas give you a 30-second cooldown for almost all potions and other Power-Ups, leaving your hotkey buffs nearly worthless. You can heal easier with Familiars and/or Skills, but Empress Cygnus has an attack that seals your skills, potentially rendering you helpless and a sitting duck if your luck is bad.
  • Arkarium's screen crack. 999,999 damage, insane range, and a very quick casting time pretty much ensures the attack is a nigh-unavoidable One-Hit KO unless your character can turn invincible.
• That One Boss: It's often debated which boss is the hardest in the game. Here are some of the front runners.
  • Pink Bean: Tons of health, MASSIVE attack stat (can inflict upwards of 20,000 damage if you even touch him with a lightly armored character), makes you go through several bosses before you even get a chance to hit him, is resistant to physical, holy, fire, and neutral damage, and can nuke the entire field for 11,000 damage. You also have a time limit of thirty minutes. Your only saving grace is the fact that it can be faced by up to 30 players at a time. You better have those healers ready. You're going to need it.
  • Magnus: Let's go through it shall we? He has over 2 billion health, a sizable attack stat, is immune to all status conditions, and is constantly causing meteors to rain down which can take anywhere between 25%-75% of your health per hit. To make matters worse, your potions only show their full effect while you're inside the field he emits... which puts you right inside his melee range. Good luck!
  • Dark Cygnus: Same health as the above and a similar attack stat. She's also a Marathon Boss, constantly summoning her knights (which have the same health as her and render her invulnerable while they're active) to keep you at bay, can inflict potential lock (all of those shiny upgrades you're so proud of, they're negated for an entire minute), can heal thirty percent of her health from time to time, reduces the effects potions have, can transform you into a pig, AND can inflict Interface Screw.
  • Lotus: Puts all of the above to shame with the release of the Black Heaven Update. 900 BILLION HEALTH, is constantly forcing you to move with his spinning taser trap, 46,000 weapon attack, has a weaker version of Magnus's meteors (10%-30% each), and spawns mobs to attack you. That's just phase one. He has two more phases to fight and that's on NORMAL mode. So far the hard version is considered impossible and has not been cleared by any team of players (part of the reason why is because he has 8,100,000,000,000 Health or 8.1*10^12 or 8,100 BILLION HEALTH to take down should his total health across the three phases be added up). The maximum damage per line is 50,000,000, meaning you'll have to land at least 162,000 lines of damage over the course of the fight even with the best gear available. Makes you wonder what Nexon was thinking when they designed this boss.
    • Possibly Absolute Virtue.
  • Damien doesn't have as much health as Lotus, but his attacks are a brutal Bullet Hell. Instead of falling debris, he instead has flying swords chase you around the map, he has THREE OHKO attacks, and he has a special attack where if it hits, you have to complete a DDR minigame or become stunned and unable to do anything while you inevitably die. He also loves to Teleport Spam, forcing you to move around even more in order to even hit him. And then he has a second form he takes once you max out the boss-unique stigma counter that gives him more attacks. God help you if he reaches this form on Hard Mode, as he has 10.8 Trillion HP while in this form.
  • Lucid: She starts off relatively tame at first. Like Damien, she subjects you to brutal Bullet Hell attacks that can kill you or severely damage you if you're not careful. She also requires 360 of the new Arcane Force stat to even damage properly. However, she remains stationary durring her first phase allowing the players to wail on her freely, provided that they pause to dodge her attacks. However, for her second phase, not only does she start flying around, but she teleports the party to a new map full of floating platforms, adding an annoying "Get Back Here!" Boss element to the battle.
  • Will: 9 billion HP on normal alone, three phases, blocks healing and requires you to use the boss-only skill Moonlight, has a wide variety of map-wide attacks, more attacks with very little windup time to react to, and multiple attacks that hit for 100% of your HP. God help you on hard, where his HP pool is upped to 40 billion.
  • Black Mage: With four phases, and an arcane requirement of 1320, the only way to do normal damage to him is level cap all six Arcane Symbols (which can easily take nearly a year of dailies for some of them) On top of that, all four phases can inflict a cure of creation and a curse of darkness. Getting hit by both curses doesn't damage you directly, but instead immediately removes one of the player's revives.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Most jump quests. You have to jump onto several platforms with pixel-perfect accuracy. Miss, and you fall down, losing half your progress if you're lucky and having to start all over otherwise. Oh, and there are hazards that inflict minimal damage, but the knockback will really hurt. They're so bad that players have practically given up on the game because of it. When it was revealed that the Wondroids were gated behind multiple jump quests, to say community backlash against this revelation was severe would be a massive understatement.
  • As bad as jump quests are, shooting galleries seem hated even more. For these (thankfully rare) parts of some quests, you have to use the mouse to position crosshairs and shoot targets that are often very small and move very fast. You have a short amount of time and a limited supply of ammunition, and nastier ones have targets you have to avoid, or even penalize you for missing.
  • In older versions of the game, there was a low-level quest that required you to deliver an item from Henesys to Omega Sector. Getting there required you to buy a ticket to Orbis, then to Ludibrium (5000 mesos each), and then descend a tower that's filled with powerful enemies. Then you have to get back, which requires buying two more tickets. And all enemies were too strong to grind on, so if you didn't have 20000 mesos, you were screwed. Needless to say this quest was removed in later versions.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The Big Bang patch is this for some players. Possibly justified for clerics and archers, where the game balance actually screws them over. Clerics can now deal more damage if they have decent weapons, true, but chairs are completely useless for restoring needed MP points (when before MP Restore would have renewed in conjunction with MP Eater in battle). Hence, the prevalence of pots dropped by enemies. In the latter case, there is an accuracy equation based on levels rather than stats (which would be okay if it only allowed you to hit things at lower levels, but it also prevents training at twenty levels higher (so, no boss runs with archers).
  • The maze forest near NLC now has a different system, making the already confusing maps in some guide websites like Hidden Street useless. (Fortunately, of the NLC alteration from the alien invasion, the maze is gone. The entire Crimsonwood area is now just a flat stretch of a few maps. No maze, no instant death jumping puzzles.)
  • Big Bang as a whole is epitome of this trope. Look at any Maplestory fan site or any popular Maplestory video on Youtube and you'll find hundreds of comments about how Big Bang destroyed the game experience. The primary source of this enmity is the changes to the EXP curve, which led many players to level solo in specific areas without following the story or doing any of the quests, ruining the community feel that detractors claim the game once had. Don't be surprised to find dozens of areas completely devoid of players while certain others are absolutely packed. Others say that the change ruined the prestige of players who had worked hard to reach higher levels prior to the patch, while others still accuse the game of becoming too easy.
    • However as the newer patches comes out (Chaos, Jump, etc), they were leaving Big Bang only as a traumatic experience for adventurers since it heavily cut the Exploration areas of Victoria Island. The Nova patch (Kaiser and Angelic Burster) killed for real the exploration element to visit the other cities with the traditional transport methods with their new brand transport system. Then comes Jump trying to balance everything, but at the end it screwed up even more the situation. To not to say other classes which comes overpowered.
  • In general the game has strayed far from the original exploration aspect since it was released, with many areas completely bypassed because the level grind from 1-200 can be done in only a few combined hours and with the frequent Burning events which offer triple speed leveling, this compresses the time down to very minimal gameplay. There is no reason to bother with low-level quests because simply killing enemies is faster. Mid-range level quests may not even offer enough reward to bother doing them. Most monster maps can be avoided because they became unnecessary. Once players reach level 200 they will likely focus on the Scrapyard and Arcane River areas, leaving the rest of the game alone. Nexon removed the Kritias area as players weren't going there(which was Nexon's fault as the maps there lacked the "burning field" bonus experience that nearly all maps level ranged 100+ have). While some players complained about the removal of the Singapore region, due to the ghost ship area being a popular training spot, there were enough alternative spots that it didn't really affect level progression whatsoever.
    • In other words, the game right now past level 200 is comparable to the original version of the game, as that is where the real grind, story and exploration are now.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: With how much of the game uses Recycled Script, it's easy to see a ton of missed opportunities regarding the unique classes. You'd expect something like Cadena's Heliseum Reclamation questline to veer far off of the base explorer line, or for Demon to have different reactions to seeing the other Commanders, but nearly all of their reactions to the same events are reused.
• Urban Legend of Zelda:
  • The introduction of several boss characters was accompanied by rumors on how to get them to appear and/or weaken them. The best example would be several versions of the same "method" to get pushover boss Mano to appear, which involved either killing certain enemies, letting certain enemies spawn, or both at once. In truth, the boss spawns every hour from when it is killed.
  • One popular schoolyard legend about the game in South-east Asia (area run by Nexon) was that to become a GM, all you need to do is to create a clean account for 6 months, after which if you're lucky a GM will send you a PM to fill in a form at a hidden URL. Sketchiness aside, it is said that if you succeed they will send you one heckuva high end workstation PC with three monitors. The worst thing is that they turn a blind eye to your actions once you become GM- this is combined with the many eyewitness reports from SEA players of GMs abusing their power and complaints falling on deaf ears.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: While there's little to no language or sexual themes, this game is actually kind of sad and scary under those cute, pixelated graphics.